The Judgement

4

Knuckles and the Armenian lugged hundred-pound rocks up the narrow steps to the top of the south gate-tower. The latter stopped at the top when they set down their load and wiped the sweat from his long arched eyebrows. He gazed out towards the hills, ghostly under the rising summer moon.

‘That I, Grigorius Khachadour Arapovian, the son of Grigorius Nubar Arapovian, the son of Grigorius Ardzruni Arapovian, should be found carrying rocks like a convict. Teamed with a boor who does not even know who his father was.’

But insulting Knuckles was like insulting a stone statue. ‘True enough,’ he rumbled, wiping his face dry in his own armpit. ‘But I know that my mother was a whore. The daughter of a whore, descended from a long line of the most highly regarded Rhenish whores for sixty generations.’ He belched and grinned.

Arapovian did not smile.

Sabinus paced the twilit battlements of the fort, staring out uneasily into the thickening dusk. Just over the horizon Margus burned on, flames rising and smoke spiralling, the molten orange firelight in a murderous melding with the last glow of the setting sun. In that orange light, the severed heads of his own men, of that good centurion Pamphilus, decorating the wooden posts on the old town bridge.

Damn them.

Different reports, and he’d have despatched his two heavily-armoured cavalry alae, his fearsome cataphracts, to slice through the enemy, save the town and hang the barbarians’ corpses from its walls. But he sensed otherwise this time. It had been a nasty business, the trans-Danube expedition by that self-same cavalry, though orders were orders, and peace might have come of it. But it hadn’t. That clumsy, ill-advised needling of a once-powerful, still troublesome tribe had only brought the Huns back on the crimson path of vengeance.

It wasn’t the numbers that unsettled him, it was the planning. ‘Organised’, that hulking Rhineland brute Knuckles had reported, and Sabinus trusted his judgement. Margus had been assaulted and sacked with great stealth, with judgement and control. Now the enemy held back, not riding on, howling, towards the next town full of vainglory. They were awaiting the right moment, planning. But planning was supposed to be for Romans, not barbarians.

‘So,’ he resumed. ‘Nothing from the hill-stations? Nothing from the signal posts upriver? Nothing from intelligence?’

Tatullus stood with his legs set apart on the platform roof like a bronze statue, gazing out over the darkening plain. ‘Nothing, sir.’

From Margus itself, still nothing. From the imperial trunk road south to Naissus, nothing. From the east by river, pushing up through the dark gorge of the Iron Gates from Ratiaria, headquarters of the Danube Fleet, nothing. And now not even the watch on the hill-stations responding. With Margus burning like a village bonfire at Saturnalia.

To have skirted south unseen and taken each and every station and watchtower in advance, without setting off a single alarm signal – that would have taken intelligence. Organisation.

‘Tell you what, Centurion. I get the unpleasant feeling we’re cut off.’

Tatullus nodded expressionlessly.

Sabinus wished he could stop talking. But something blackly ominous in the air tonight made him talk, even with so unsympathetic a confidant as his iron centurion.

‘Of course, no barbarian horde is ever going to take a legionary fortress. But if we’re going to go down fighting and not come up again – if – it would be good to know that someone would exact a decent revenge in our name. What do you reckon?’

‘I wish I knew, sir.’

Both knew what that meant. Some chance.

The Eastern generals corrupt and squabbling, the field army at Marcianopolis, under that impetuous Easterner Aspar, too little tried and tested – certainly never against an enemy like the Huns. Emperor Theodosius in his gilded chambers at Constantinople, practising his calligraphy.

Tatullus said, ‘It’d be good to have some reinforcements from the west.’

Both knew what that meant, too.

Master-General Aetius. Mistrusted by both emperors equally. The empire’s last best hope.

Another refugee arrived, a rat-faced little man with his hair plastered across his narrow skull, and water still squelching from his sodden leather sandals. He wore the dull brown uniform of the exploratores. A scout.

‘Why is everyone so bloody wet around here?’ demanded Sabinus.

‘Sir,’ gasped the half-drowned man, ‘river was the only refuge from the barbarians. Scythians.’

‘Huns.’

The little man stared up at the legate. ‘Is it?’ He didn’t look much consoled. ‘Well, their horses don’t take kindly to water. Not used to it off the plains, I reckon.’

Sabinus made a mental note. ‘Anything else?’

‘Numbers, sir.’

‘I’ve heard a thousand. At Margus.’

The man looked pained. ‘No, sir, afraid not. That was only a detachment.’ He wiped the water still dripping from his nose. ‘Maybe even a distraction. More were coming across downriver all the time.’

‘Without being seen?’

‘All observation posts knocked out, sir. Rest of my watch all put to the sword. They know what they’re doing.’

He was beginning to realise that. ‘So: numbers?’

‘In total?’ The man took a deep breath. ‘In a valley up in the hills to the south, saw them myself… ten thousand?’

Sabinus felt Tatullus beside him stir.

‘But other reports say that they’re only one grouping, as it were, sir. One legion, you might say. As many again in… other valleys.’

‘Tens of thousands?’

‘It could be, sir.’

‘But only a third, a quarter of them fighting men.’ Sabinus mused. ‘Always a damn-fool way to move around, with your women and children along for the spectacle.’ He looked at Tatullus. ‘We could try and get through to Singidunum, to-’

The scout dared to interrupt. ‘No, sir. Not this time, not this lot. They’re all males. No families, no women and children, just warriors.’

Sabinus stared at him as the worsening news sank in. ‘Shit.’ He held the back of his hand up to his mouth, then dropped it again. An unseemly gesture.

So their flight north was a feint, after the punitive expedition. It was only to hide their women and children away, somewhere north or east, out in that endless wilderness.

‘We could try tracking them, use special forces, the superventores. Bring them in, hold them for ransom, exchange, treaty.’

But Tatullus was already shaking his head.

No, Sabinus couldn’t see any such trans-Danube operations going ahead, either. Not now. And did he have the men, anyway? No. He did not have the bloody men.

‘Cunning bastards,’ breathed Tatullus. ‘They’ve learned a lot.’

There was a long silence, then Sabinus said to the scout, ‘Go and get some dry kit on.’

Tatullus called after him, ‘And a weapon.’

Sabinus set his clenched fists on the wall. ‘Trying to drive them off the Trans-Pannonian plain with a pinprick. With my cavalry. Damn that fool in Ravenna. Him and his magic.’

‘Sir?’

‘The Emperor Valentinian. And right now I’d tell him so to his sickly face, and damn the consequences. Sacrificing cockerels under the full moon. Punitive expeditions. He thinks we’re still living back in Trajan’s reign. Today’s barbarians are…’

‘Organised.’

Sabinus stared out grimly and said nothing.

‘So now we have to face some tens of thousands of Huns. But they know nothing of siegecraft.’

‘True. Though they’re smart enough to use only enough warriors for each job. Any more than a thousand at Margus and they’d have been trampling on each other. But I still don’t rate them against a legion plus heavy cavalry in open battle.’ He leaned his weight forwards on his fists. ‘We need to clear them out. The Huns have been a force to be reckoned with before. I don’t want any more losses like Margus in this province.’

‘Still,’ said Tatullus quietly. ‘Tens of thousands…’

And his centurion was no coward.

They both knew their only option.

Eventually Sabinus leaned back again and said, ‘Very well. We sit here. We keep ’em at bay. We wait for news to get through, they’ll get word soon enough, and the field army will arrive hot-foot from Marcianopolis. Then… we put an end to them.’

‘Easy,’ said Tatullus.

Sabinus glanced sideways at his centurion, but it was impossible to read him.

The legate ate a light supper on the tower roof, standing. Bread, lentils, a few slices of pigeon breast. No booze. Not tonight.

He racked his brains, trying to remember the name. Rumours abounded. Emperor Valentinian’s fearsome old mother, Galla Placidia – the Eastern Emperor’s cousin, come to that – had always had a special thing about the Huns, so they said.

And her master-general – sorry, the emperor’s master-general – Aetius, he spoke Hunnish himself, among other tongues. He’d lived with the Huns for a time as a boy. They should be allies, but some said that was all in the past. The Huns were Rome’s sworn enemies now, and Rome had better get used to it.

What was that leader’s name?

He sent a junior officer back to his office to find the communication.

That was it. He smacked the piece of paper. The new warlord of the Hun tribe.

His uncle, Ruga, had been a sot and a willing client. There was every reason to think Ruga’s eldest nephew, Bleda, would succeed to the same drunken, obedient position. Then a younger brother suddenly appeared out of the wilderness. Vanished for three long decades, but still not forgotten in Rome or Ravenna, apparently. He’d been a captive – hostage, rather – in the capital, in the Imperial Palace itself, back in Honorius’ day. Made repeated escape attempts, and eventually succeeded in fleeing north through Italy at the height of the Gothic invasion. Evaded every attempt at capture, the little tyke, and got back to his homeland. Sabinus remembered the story vaguely. The boy had been all of ten or twelve when he did it. It was said that the emperor’s mother still remembered him bitterly, still wanted him gone. And somehow or other, that old winebag Ruga had helpfully got rid of him, for a few more hogsheads of cheap wine.

But not for ever, it seemed.

Now he was back, and not a bit mellowed by age, apparently. Frontier intelligence said he’d promptly slaughtered his uncle, then his brother, set the crown on his own head, pulled together a whole horde of disparate tribes out of the godforsaken wilderness, and then led the lot of them back over the Carpathians to the Huns’ old pasturelands north of the Danube. A deliberate provocation. That was when Valentinian had ordered a punitive attack. Theodosius agreed. Idiots, both of them, Valentinian stupid and corrupt, Theodosius just stupid. Their most idiotic failing, to underestimate this thorn in Rome’s side since his boyhood. Now the VIIth itself would have to settle the matter.

As always, it was kings and emperors who ran up the bill and the soldiers who paid it.

Sabinus swallowed a last chunk of bread.

Deep night fell.

Attila. That was his name.

The western sky burned on.